Nat Hentoff Quotes

We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.

The proposed Health Care Reform bill will put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.

President Obama says he will not support a healthcare plan where the government gets to decide whether to, quote, 'pull the plug on Grandma.' Apparently, Obama's plan calls for the much quicker pillow option.

Under Medicare right now, I get paid to put a pacemaker in you, but I don't get paid to counsel you about end-of-life care.

One of the things in Obamacare is that for the elderly, is every five years, you must have end-of-year counseling. Translation, 'suicide counseling.'

Present law has a process to ascertain whether or not a patient is in a persistent vegetative state, and it should not matter what politicians think.

Make no mistake: Obamacare is a pro-death 'health' program.

Obamacare is going to destroy the elderly by denying care, by even perhaps denying treatment to people who are in catastrophic circumstances.

I am proposing that every person over sixty-five years of age be spared the darkness of sickness without hope.

Most death now happens in hospitals. It's been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that's a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.

The doctors allow one to die, the charlatans kill.

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.

If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.

In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia

She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.

People don't die of old age, they die of neglect.

A woman in the audience asked [Barack] Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.

Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

Dying people don't need medicine, the ones who remain do.

Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that, every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner

I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.

Human life has dignity at every age the taking of innocent human life is always wrong. I believe our nation at every level of government must reject any scheme to permit or promote assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.

There are over 30 doctors running for the US Congress this year. That's going to be rather strange. Half the time these folks will be playing God and asking women to take their clothes off and the other half the time they will be doctors.